Exercise six mornings each week alternating between aerobic and muscular exercise

M a x i m i s e H a i r G r o w t h

Exercise six mornings each week alternating between aerobic and muscular exercise...

Last updated: 22th February, 2021

Aerobic exercise such as running, jogging, running on the spot (on a thick rubber mat to prevent jarring of the ankles) or walking stimulates hair growth by increasing the circulation of blood throughout your body, including your head and scalp. This increases the health of your scalp and ensures that the nutrients contained within your blood, as a result of the food you eat, are readily available to your hair which grows out of your scalp. A lack of circulation of blood in your scalp will curtail the growth of your hair, whereas an increase in the circulation of blood in your scalp will promote the growth of your hair. Muscular exercise such as weight-training stimulates the production of growth hormone in your body, which also has a powerful effect in promoting hair growth.

My personal preference is to treat every day the same, except for Saturday, the day of rest, and exercise in the morning on each of these six days of the week, alternating between aerobic exercise one morning with muscular exercise the next, so that there’s an entire two days (ie. 48 hours) of recovery time between each instance of the same type of exercise, aerobic or muscular. During this recovery time, the muscles that you’ve broken down during exercise are built back up again as a result of the nutrition you supply to your body, so that these muscles become stronger. By treating every day the same, except Saturday, and exercising in the morning on each of these six days, it’s much easier to implement a schedule to follow, than if you just exercise three or four times per week, because you’ll be operating on the same timetable every day except Saturday, the day of rest. So your weekly exercise schedule would look something like this:

Sunday morning: Muscular exercise - Weight-training

Monday morning: Aerobic exercise - Running

Tuesday morning: Muscular exercise - Weight-training

Wednesday morning: Aerobic exercise - Running

Thursday morning: Muscular exercise - Weight-training

Friday morning: Aerobic exercise – Running

There’s no need to be intimidated by the thought of exercising six mornings each week because you should always exercise at an intensity that’s achievable for you. If you aren’t yet up to running or jogging, or you simply don’t want to, you can walk instead. If the thought of getting out in the early morning to run in the middle of winter horrifies you, like it often horrifies me, you can buy a thick neoprene mat to absorb shock and run on the spot indoors, or you can purchase a more expensive treadmill. The objective isn’t to knock yourself out by overexerting yourself. The objective is to progressively build up your fitness and resilience, which will have a dramatic effect on the health of your hair. This is achieved by training well within your physiological capacity and choosing an activity that you enjoy, so that you’ll be more likely to stick with it. In fact, you’ll find that overexerting yourself will be counterproductive, because you’ll end up becoming so tired that you won’t want to exercise at all.

If you follow a weekly exercise schedule like this by exercising six mornings each week, and if you support your exercise with good nutrition on a daily basis and with stretching before and after exercising, then I guarantee you that after a few short weeks, you’ll find yourself in the best shape you’ve ever been, feeling the best physically that you ever have.

There are plenty of things you can do to make exercising enjoyable. In the case of running, jogging or walking, you can enjoy being outside and breathing the fresh air. You can enjoy the peace, calm and tranquillity of the early morning before everybody starts darting around. You can listen to music on your iPod if you want to, or anything else that grabs your interest. In the case of muscular exercise, you can listen to the radio or any other music you like while you’re exercising. You also have a golden opportunity to do small chores, if you want to, such as putting a load of clothes in the washing machine in the resting time between sets of repetitions, so that by the time you’ve finished exercising, you’ll have the satisfaction of having squared away some chores, which goes a long way towards keeping the house in order.

Because your morning schedule will be exactly the same timewise on six mornings of the week, you’ll find yourself able to get into this routine quickly and easily. It’s simply dependent on eating nutritiously to supply your body with the fuel it needs for exercise and getting to bed each night at 9:00 pm, because this routine depends on getting up at 5:00 am every morning. You’ll quickly come to look forward to the 50 minutes of exercise between 6:05 am and 6:55 am each morning as your time of solitude at the start of the day when you can gather your thoughts at your own pace while you invest time in maintaining and enhancing your physical condition. The whole routine will quickly become entirely habitual for you because every morning is the same except for Saturday morning.

I strongly believe that the only suitable time to exercise is in the early morning between 6:05 am and 6:55 am. This leaves the time between 6:55 am and 7:45 am free to get ready for work and it leaves the time between 7:45 am and 8:30 am free for travelling to work. It’s not advisable to exercise after 6 pm in the evening, after finishing work, because your body is already tired from the day’s activities and your mind is overrun with many different thoughts arising from the day’s activities, which makes exercising at this time stressful. Most importantly, exercising at this late time in the day is going to substantially stimulate your body physically so that you’ll find it quite difficult to get to sleep later on in the night. This can cause considerable problems such as being cut short of sleep since you’ll probably have a set time you have to get up by the next morning. There’s also the obvious issue of how to fit exercise in the evening in with preparing dinner, consuming dinner and washing up, which is difficult and puts pressure on the time you set aside to exercise, so that you’re less likely to enjoy it, because you’ll be in a rush. In short, there are really no advantages to exercising in the evening, only disadvantages.

In contrast, by exercising in the early morning, between 6:05 am and 6:55 am, your body will be fully rested, because you will have just finished sleeping and your body will be revitalised as a result of fully digesting and utilising the nutritious dinner you ate the night before. Your mind will be overrun with few thoughts at this time, which means you can devote yourself to enjoying your 50 minutes of exercise. Exercising at this time means waking up at 5:00 am after going to sleep at 9:00 pm and giving your body a full hour before exercising to adjust to being up and vertical, as opposed to asleep and horizontal in bed. During this hour you can use the bathroom, drink half a litre of reverse osmosis purified water, get dressed in preparation for exercise and consume a scoop of whey protein (ie. 30 grams) to prepare your body for the demands of exercise.

Another benefit of exercising in the early morning before breakfast is that by the time you go to sleep at night, you’ll be sufficiently tired from all of the day’s activities, together with your exercise at the start of the day, that you’ll fall asleep straight away and have a good, restful, rejuvenating sleep. The alternative to this is lying awake when you know you really should be sleeping and suffering the degenerative effects of insomnia, which is everybody’s worst nightmare in today’s busy world. The solution to insomnia is very simple. Exercise in the early morning before breakfast, six mornings each week, alternating between weight training one morning for your muscular exercise and running, jogging or walking the next morning for your aerobic exercise.

If you choose to run for your aerobic exercise, it’s very important that you find a soft surface to run on, such as a grassed sporting field nearby or the sand on a beach nearby. Otherwise, if you run on concrete pavement, it will really take its toll on your knees and joints and it’s almost inevitable that you’ll eventually have to go under the knife in surgery for knee reconstruction. It’s much more sensible to avoid this kind of drama altogether by finding a soft surface to run on.

Whether you run, jog or walk for your aerobic exercise, it’s vitally important that you incorporate ten minutes of stretching of your legs, before and after, into your regimen. You can look up stretches for your legs in your search engine. When you run, jog or walk for exercise, you’re breaking down the muscle in your leg so that it will be built back up in the 48 hours of recovery time as a result of the food you eat. If you don’t stretch before and after this exercise, you’re leaving yourself much more open to injury and you’re missing a golden opportunity to improve the condition of your ligaments, as well as your flexibility. Going for a run without stretching is like taking a car out for a vigorous drive without allowing the engine to warm up first through idling. It’s almost inevitable that your engine will eventually end up with a blown head gasket, just as it’s almost inevitable that you’ll tear a muscle in your legs and have to take a prolonged break from exercising while it heals. Please don’t run, jog or even walk without stretching before and after. Your body will thank you for it and you’ll find yourself much more ready to run, jog or walk after you’ve finished stretching. If you also support your body with good nutrition on a daily basis, you’ll find that stretching before and after you exercise will leave you with very few aches or pains afterwards. In fact, I’ve found that I have no aches and pains after running, as a result of taking care of my body by stretching before and after.

I recommend that you run, jog or walk for twenty-five (25) minutes in order to properly increase the circulation of blood throughout your body, including your head, so that your scalp and your hair which grows out of it is adequately stimulated by this increased blood flow and the nutrients it contains. If you support your body with good nutrition on a daily basis, other benefits of this type of exercise are:

increased health of your heart

much better mental acuity so that you perform better at your daily work

stronger leg muscles and increased muscle mass in your legs

For muscular exercise, lifting weights and doing supplementary exercises like push-ups, sit-ups and arm and alternate leg raises while lying on your stomach are, in my opinion, the best muscular exercises that you can do to stimulate the production of growth hormone in your body and generally condition the muscularity of your body.

It’s important to choose weights to lift that are well within your physical capacity so that you’re steadily getting stronger, instead of straining to keep up with the weight that you’ve chosen to lift, which is counterproductive. You’re much more likely to damage tendons and ligaments in your body, such as in your arms, if you try to lift weight that’s beyond your physical capacity. This will, of course, result in you needing to take a break from lifting weights while this damage heals. It’s counterproductive. It’s also very important to stretch the part of your body that you’re exercising before and after the exercise involving it, so that you greatly reduce your chance of tearing a muscle or a ligament and so that you improve the flexibility of all of the different parts of your body.

Here is the muscular exercise regimen that I follow, which I can comfortably complete within 50 minutes at a steady pace:

Exercise your arms…

Stretch your arms by pushing your arms behind your chest for thirty (30) seconds, since you’re about to exercise your arms.

Do twelve repetitions of a biceps curl with a barbell and a suitable weight.

Do twelve repetitions of a forearm curl with a barbell and a suitable weight and the opposite grip on both hands to that used for a biceps curl (ie. with your palms facing you before you grip the bar) in order to exercise your forearms and build up the muscularity of the forearms.

Do twelve repetitions of a triceps curl with a barbell and a suitable weight while lying on your back on an exercise mat and using the opposite grip on both hands to that used for a biceps curl (ie. with your palms facing you before you grip the bar). It’s very important to develop the triceps in your arms as well as the biceps in your arms. Both muscles are equally important.

Do two lots of twelve repetitions on each hand using one of those v-shaped wrist exercisers that you hold in your hand and compress in order to complete one repetition. This builds up the muscle in your hands and the strength of your hands.

Stretch your arms by pushing your arms behind your chest for thirty (30) seconds, since you’ve now finished exercising your arms.

Exercise your shoulders…

Stretch your shoulders, since you’re about to exercise your shoulders. You can search for shoulder stretches using your search engine. In short, you should clasp your fingers together, with your arms outstretched above your head. Then you should hold each arm behind your head by the elbow. Lastly you should hold each arm across your chest by the elbow. Each of these stretches should be for thirty (30) seconds each, which totals 2.5 minutes. This will provide you with the proper stretching of your shoulder muscles so that you don’t damage your shoulders when you exercise them.

Do twelve repetitions of a military press behind your head with a barbell and a suitable weight, either standing or sitting.

Do twelve repetitions of a military press in front of your head with a barbell and a suitable weight, either standing or sitting.

Do twelve repetitions pulling the barbell and a suitable weight up to your chin with your hands gripping the barbell close together in the middle of the barbell and your palms facing you before you grip the bar.

Do twelve repetitions of shoulder shrugs with your hands gripping the barbell and a suitable weight at shoulder width apart and your palms facing you before you grip the bar.

Do twelve repetitions on each shoulder of dumbbell rows with a suitable weight while supporting your weight on one knee and one hand (ie. your left knee and your left hand, or your right knee and your right hand) on a bench, bed or sofa. This exercise involves starting from a position in which your arm that’s gripping the dumbbell is straight at the elbow, keeping your forearm, on your arm that’s gripping the dumbbell, vertical and raising the dumbbell into the air until your upper arm is horizontal. You then lower the dumbbell back down until your arm is straight at the elbow again. That cycle is one single repetition of a dumbbell row.

Stretch your shoulders the same way you stretched them before exercising your shoulders, since you’ve now finished exercising your shoulders.

Exercise your chest muscles…

Stretch your chest muscles by pushing your arms behind your chest for thirty (30) seconds, since you’re about to exercise your chest muscles.

Do two sets of thirty push-ups, or however many you can manage, in order to strengthen your chest muscles. The number of push-ups you can do consecutively is also a good general test of muscular fitness.

Stretch your chest muscles by pushing your arms behind your chest for thirty (30) seconds, since you’ve now finished exercising your chest muscles.

Exercise your lower back…

Do twenty-five (25) sit-ups on an exercise mat with your knees forming a ninety (90) degree angle and your feet wedged under the bottom of a sofa or something similar. It’s very important to exercise your abdominal muscles in this way so that they’re strong enough to support your spine and so that you can avoid the back problems that inevitably result from weak abdominal muscles.

Do sixty (60) leg and alternate arm raises while lying on your stomach on an exercise mat. This strengthens your lower back opposite your abdominal muscles to ensure that your spine is adequately supported and so that you can avoid back problems that inevitably result from a weak lower back.

Exercise your neck muscles…

Strengthen your neck muscles by pressing the front, rear, left and right sides of your head consecutively against the resistance of both of your hands with a good amount of force for thirty (30) seconds each. You’ll soon notice the results of these neck exercises so that you’ll see them as an indispensable part of your overall muscular exercise routine.

By now you should be feeling great! Muscular exercise gives rise to the natural benefit of your body producing endorphins as you choose a weight to lift that’s within your physical capacity and as you push back against the resistance that it presents to you. Muscular exercise also results in your body producing growth hormone, which is a powerful catalyst for the growth of your hair. By leaving a full two days (ie. 48 hours) between each session of muscular exercise that you undertake in the morning, you’ll be giving your body the time that it needs to build up the muscle that you’ve broken down during exercise, via the nutrition that you supply to your body, and you’ll find that you’ll be raring to go at the start of your next session of muscular exercise. This is a powerful, circular cycle which will provide you with the motivation to not only stick with your sessions of muscular exercise in the long-term, but enjoy them.

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